Kalief Browder, in His Own Words

Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, excessive use of solitary confinement, teen-agers being charged for crimes as adults, brutality on the part of corrections officers. In 2015, Browder committed suicide. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gonnerman shares excerpts from the interviews she recorded with Browder, in which he described the psychological toll of spending years in a twelve-by-seven cell.

Jennifer Gonnerman revisits her interviews with Kalief Browder, whose suicide last year called attention to the excessive use of solitary confinement in prisons.

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